An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles • Hacker News Board

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#221

Post by labster » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

gkop wrote: post #216

hbosch wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct! If we simply let the person die of cancer, we can properly investigate the tumor when they are dead.

I should have given more context. In cases where incentives are deeply, structurally misaligned, and it will take heroic effort and significant luck to yield an order of magnitude improvement over the status quo, we should consider "letting it burn" as an option, and recognize the total cost of treating the symptoms. The global logistics quagmire may be a candidate for nuclear-ish options. Agree with you on the cance…

Let the global supply chain burn? By Jove, let’s have a great depression!

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#222

Post by defen » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

revel wrote: post #168

defen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem Isn't that alone an indictment of him or his organization (which, by extension, is an indictment of him)? Why did no one on his team tell him about the container backlog? If they did, why did they not suggest that he allow containers to be stacked higher? This isn't a new problem, it's been going on since at least March if not ear…

This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with. Local government is not equipped to randomly start calling in experts and directing large scale projects because we, collectively, have chosen not to fund and structure our government in a way that allows them to do so. Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers c…

> This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with

Do you specifically mean local governments here when you say organizations? If he were the CEO of Long Beach, Inc, and you were a shareholder, would you consider any of this to be reasonable?

> Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers can -- and should -- be stacked 3+ high

I don't believe that the mayor of Long Beach has never seen a fully-loaded container ship. A good first question might be "Why can we stack them 9-high on a ship that traverses the Pacific ocean but only 2-high on land"?

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#223

Post by clairity » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #133

kaesar14 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?

> Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts? Because we pay our politicians terribly low compared to other leadership positions. Our best leaders have gone to Facebook / Google to make better ads. It makes no sense for a 18-year-old going into college to study political theo…

$180K puts you well within the top 20% in income. pay is not the problem. in fact, trying to solve politician quality by increasing pay would likely worsen the problem by misaligning incentives even more. also the assumption that the best and the brightest are managers at tech companies is amusingly naive.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#224

Post by bluGill » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #115

> * 14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.* > 15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away. It's been my experience that nearly all of…

While you are not wrong, it isn't 100% true either. The problem has long been recognized in various forms and solutions have been developed. I did a factory tour a few years back for a local major manufacture (I work for them but I won't say who...), and there were signs all over "stop the line: you have the power!" to remind workers when they see something wrong they have the power to stop everything until it is fixed. It doesn't happen often, but more than once a worker has seen a part that looked "off" stopped the line and had a full investigation done. Sometimes it was determined things were okay, but other times the wrong alloy was used if the part had gone to a customer it would have been an early failure.

Of course the above is only able to fix local issues. It doesn't really leave any way for someone to say "we will have a bottleneck here if something else goes wrong"...

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#225

Post by gkop » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

labster wrote: post #221

gkop wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have given more context. In cases where incentives are deeply, structurally misaligned, and it will take heroic effort and significant luck to yield an order of magnitude improvement over the status quo, we should consider "letting it burn" as an option, and recognize the total cost of treating the symptoms. The global logistics quagmire may be a candidate for nuclear-ish options. Agree with you on the cance…

Let the global supply chain burn? By Jove, let’s have a great depression!

Let the containers on the streets piss people off to build pressure to align incentives, rather than prolonging the problem with a temporary stacking improvement. This is just a tool in our toolbox that we should not ignore, I'm not saying it's the right tool. But there is a cost of papering over the root cause, that's not free.

BTW I don't live in LA/Long Beach. I recognize that LA doesn't deserve the quality of life degradation, that's an externality. We have tools to resolve externalities. I could imagine living in an affected neighborhood in LA and being super grateful for the container stacking "quick fix".

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#226

Post by bluGill » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #131

gota wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inching close to the conclusion that mandatory expert panels are required for government to function. But then you go back to the problem of "who determines who are the experts". Point in case, the anti-vaccine politicians dredge up the 1 out of a 1000 doctors that spouts whatever fits their narrative. Lots o people die gasping for air unnecessarily as a result... And we have no idea how to begin to solve tha…

Huh? Calling up your local shipping exec for a meeting is most definitely not forming "expert panels"

It might me. If they are just called at random things are fine. However if you do a little work you can figure out who will support whatever position you want.

A few months ago I listened to one "expert panel" called before congress about high speed trail. Most of the people didn't have any useful expertise on the subject. There was the union rep who considered anything good so long as it makes jobs - if they could dig and refill the same hole all day that would be good). There was the you are not listening to NIMBYs enough - without any acknowledgement on how much NIMBYs had been listened to. There were several people who define HSR so slow that Amtrak meets it.

I believe the above is typical of congressional hearings, though I don't have 4 hours to sit through them on a regular basis. (I had a lot of long compiling tasks to do that day)

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#227

Post by bluGill » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #117

slobiwan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate u…

I read recently that there’s such a great demand for containers in Asia right now that empty containers which used to be sent to our farms to fill with agricultural products to sell in Asia are instead being sent back empty. Maybe the consensus is outdated?

Agriculture has been aware of this for a while. It is more complex than that. Loaded containers need to consider balance of this ship, and grain is typically denser/heavier than what came over (most goods come over with a lot of air), so ships need to be carefully loaded, while only empty containers are easier to load because it is easier to balance the ship.

Making the above worse, even though containers are worth more in Asia, and containers of grain are worth a lot: to ship owners they get paid more for the Asia to US trip than the return trip, a ship that leaves the US unloaded (taking on ballast while unloading) and rushes back to Asia makes more money at the end of the year than a ship that waits around in LA to be reloaded with containers.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#228

Post by morelisp » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #207

jlkuester7 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is the only one worth going into Sure, when your critical system goes down an RCA is hugely important and ultimately you have to apply a fix that addresses the core issue to avoid it happening again in the future. But, at the time that the system is actually down it seems like the most important first step (once you understand the problem) is to get the system running again ASAP. This can give you the runway to fix…

For us software developers, it seems like the shipping industry has the container equivalent of a memory leak (a "container leak" if you will). Then the stacking rule change is the equivalent of simply adding more memory to the system, it doesn't fix the problem, but it buys you some more time of normal system operation before the next out-of-memory crash. Hopefully they use this time they bought to work on an actual…

If you want to phrase it in programming terms, there's a pretty obvious comparison to semaphores and deadlocks. We've deadlocked. As a workaround we've increased a bunch of our semaphore limits. But we also had those limits for a reason (various balances of safety, efficiency, and available amount of other ancillary resources). Maybe now we'll run out of some other resource, or hit contention somewhere else - we don't really know, the system is big and hasn't been operated in this state before. And on top of that, we didn't solve the fundamental deadlock - if the underlying conditions persist, there's hard limits to how often we can do this before we deadlock permanently.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#229

Post by bregma » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

labster wrote: post #221

gkop wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have given more context. In cases where incentives are deeply, structurally misaligned, and it will take heroic effort and significant luck to yield an order of magnitude improvement over the status quo, we should consider "letting it burn" as an option, and recognize the total cost of treating the symptoms. The global logistics quagmire may be a candidate for nuclear-ish options. Agree with you on the cance…

Let the global supply chain burn? By Jove, let’s have a great depression!

Why not? It worked last time.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#230

Post by phicoh » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

cyberge99 wrote: post #46

This is a regional problem. There are other ports in the US (East Coast, etc). I don’t see how it will be a global problem. Sure it will affect supply and demand significantly, but it’s not a global catastrophe.

Based on container port statistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...) LA and Long Beach are not very big compared to Rotterdam and Antwerp. And Hamburg is roughly in the middle between LA and Long Beach in size.

LA and Long Beach don't seem big enough to cause a global problem.